Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Subscribe to WPPlugins A to Z on Email | RSS
All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of John and Amber’s discussion of this weeks plugins that have been reviewed.
WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #508 here.
It’s a FLoC’ing Good Time It’s Episode 508 – We have plugins for Watching the Earth, Making Sure it Fits, Searching, Login Controls, Tracking Sales, Going FLoC’ing Crazy…., and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!
Episode #508
John: All right, ClassicPress options. We do not have any ClassicPress options this week. It was another quiet week in ClassicPress, and mainly because I haven’t done any research, but I bet they’re gearing up to do some stuff. We released some stuff a week or two ago, a couple of shows ago, that showed that they’re alive and well and kicking, and they will be bringing forth some stuff real soon. So look for them coming soon.
As far as WordPress goes though, we do have some plugins. The first one I’ve got right off the bat is Disable FLoC easily. Okay, this is as we were just talking about, getting the FLoC out of here, it seems it has become very popular. This new surveillance arm from Google, and it’s not being well-received through the WordPress fear. I get the feeling, this is eventually going to happen anyway, but there are people putting up a resistance right now. And if you choose not to participate in this surveillance system on your particular website, you can’t stop it throughout the Internet, but you can stop it at your website. You can install this plugin, which tells the Google FLoC censors to get the FLoC off your website and go somewhere else. This is the first plugin I found this morning when I was looking through and doing some research on some plugin, but it wasn’t the last. By the time I finished, I had found — I had a number in here until somebody edited my copy. I had a number — oh, there it is. They changed it from a number to letters, messing me up. There’re four that I found. Four plugins were found, and I’m sure there’s more coming down the pike. And the fact that they want to stick it in court just tells me that this is happening. Of course, this is a free plugin. It does a good service I believe. So I’m going to rate this one at a five-dragon rating. Go check it out and get the FLoC off your website
Amber: Yeah, I’ve noticed that when I’m checking out the new plugins, there’s like — I saw about six in the first four pages when I was searching through them last night. They’re just they’re popping up everywhere, and I’m not surprised.
John: I’m not overly surprised either.
Amber: The first one I’ve got is Search Only Post. So I came across this when I was looking for different options for the search functions, and I thought there would be more to this honestly. Once you download and activate it, that’s it. There’s nothing else you need to do. It just forces the WordPress search function to search and only posts. And to turn this off, you need to deactivate the plugin. I had thought that there would be like a settings page where you could choose turn on or off, maybe set it up, so there’ll be a time or something — I figured there would be something more to it, but that’s just not the case. You just do activate it and it’s on. Seeing how it’s only for the WordPress function though, I could see using this in conjunction with another search option, like say, maybe Ivory, and then having them both up maybe, and like labeling them, one is for posts, one is for this, maybe that would work.
John: I don’t know. Ivory — if you get the premium version. In Ivory, you can just search in posts. And you really wouldn’t want to run two search plugins at the same time because they’re liable to crush into each other.
Amber: I was thinking, but that’s kind of the only way I can think about this being useful unless you have a site where you only want people to see your posts and nothing else on your site may be, I don’t know.
John: There are people that have sites like that. They’re called bloggers. And that’s all their site is a blog. So it could be useful in that aspect, but it does sound kind of a limiting plugin.
Amber: I was kind of underwhelmed. I mean, I could see it being useful, I guess specifically for bloggers. So if you think you could really use this, then please go check it out. It’s called Search Only Posts, but I personally rate that at three dragons.
John: Alrighty. Yeah, well, there’s no sound port. That’s a nice . All right, the next one I have for you, this is one that I’m checking out right now because I now have an Ecommerce store over at the roguestavern.com, and I’m going to have to start creating reports for my sales and other things in there. So I’m looking to find something to consolidate reports, spit out reports, in particular, tax reports, because you got to give the government their blood money all the time. This one here looks pretty decent for a free plugin. It helps you layout your orders by payment method by status, by amount, by date, you know, columns, shipping totals, amount totals calculated automatically. I don’t know if it does the taxes and stuff that I need so far, but I’m checking it out. And there’s a lot of plugins for WooCommerce that help you go into your orders and make sense of all the data in there and separate it out and be able to pass the information on to your accounting person or whatever. At any rate, this one looked pretty good. I thought it would be one worth checking out, so if you’re looking for something for WooCommerce to order up your reports or make create ordered reports for your content or your sales, go check this plugin out. It’s called Order Reports for WooCommerce, and I give it a four-dragon rating.
Amber: I could see that being really useful. I’m interested to know if that actually adds up all the taxes and stuff that you’re going to be needing.
John: Yeah I don’t know. I don’t know yet. I know WooCommerce monitors that stuff, but the reports WooCommerce gives you from its core is not all that good.
Amber: Okay, my next one up is NVV Login Control. I think this is a really neat idea, changing up your login, making it personalized. This one has a lot of options. It comes in English and Russian, though it does work with translation things, so it can be put in just about any language. It has like customization options for CSS or to make your own maintenance page. You can actually make the maintenance page, which I really appreciate, not just change around the words on the page. It gives you access to a closed site on behalf of any user. So long as you are a trusted user that I found really cool. Those are just a few of the options. There’re a lot of options on there. It seems like a really in-depth plugin. I really like how much it has going for it. It’s a brand new out-of-the-box premium plugin, so I think, hopefully, it’s going to go a long way, though I could be wrong because I do know there are a lot of plugins like this. I like this one. It’s very user-friendly, easy to set up, run smoothly so far, hopefully, no bugs pop up, and it also has a reCAPTCHA. I know that not many people have to really appreciate the captions, but I like them a lot. And if you’re looking to customize your login page, go and check this one out. It is NVV Login Control, and I rate at five dragons.
John: All right, the final one I’ve got for you today, 33, it’s the magic number.
John: I decided to do a random search in wordpress.org plugins and see what comes up if you just type in 33, and see what plugins are related to 33. Well, there’s quite a few of them. Some of them junk, some of them useful. But as I was finding, I wandered in and discovered this Earthquake Monitor plugin. And at the state of the world today, it’s a good thing to know about what earthquakes are happening in the world. So I decided to download it, install it, activate it, and then go check it out and see how it works. You want to see it in live-action, just go check out the roguestavern.com/news page, scroll partway down, and it gives you a list of all 2.5 earthquakes or better in the last 24 hours. Hey, we just had one in Alaska an hour ago 2.7, Puerto Rico had a 3.6. And it gives you all the major earthquakes, 7.0 or better in the last 180 days. So it’s really kind of cool. Really just a slight piece of information to help you out, and if you’re running a website with that kind of information, it pulls this information. This plugin pulls the information directly from the US Geological Survey that monitors earthquakes around the globe and spits that data out regularly. Also with the plugin, you can get either a widget, which sets up really fast, or you can use a shortcode to set it up anywhere on your site you want. And when you set up the shortcode, you get the cool multicolored text, and if you set it up as a widget, you just get the plain single-colored text. So, at any rate, I thought it was a pretty cool plugin. I thought it was a neat piece of information to help people out, you know, if they wanted to find out this information, and the fact that it’s free and does exactly what it’s supposed to with no muss, no fuss. I have to rate this one at a five-dragon rating.
Go check it out the Earthquake Monitor.
Amber: It is really cool.
John: Yeah, it’s a cool little plugin.
Amber: Last one I’ve got is size guarantee. This plugin is designed to make it easier for those using WooCommerce to sell clothing or other size-related apparel so that their customers can have it sized more properly to them individually. What it does, it takes the customer through a size guarantee profile that they set up and that they can use any time by that customer anywhere. The shopper just needs to log in and compare the clothes from any retailer or distributor with their size profile to know the best fit. Drawback though is that in order to use this for your site, you need to sign your site up with size guarantee website. Once you sign up with them, you can put your API key into your plugin and off you go. I can see major uses for those if you’re a clothing store, though I personally don’t like the idea of having my customers create an account with a third party to shop on my site. That’s just my personal opinion.
John: Data, man, data. Got to get that data.
Amber: I rate this at four dragons.
John: Alrighty. Well, that’s all we got there on the plugins. This show is still brought to you by…
Are you tired of the same old web hosting, not having the resources you need to run your website properly, having a lack of control, then you need johnoverall.com web hosting, providing you with all the resources you need to smoothly run your WordPress website or ClassicPress website. With strict limits on the number of clients allowed per server, johnoverall.com provides high-quality, fast server performance. Visit johnoverall.com for web hosting that won’t slow you down.
John: Absolutely, high-quality web hosting. More people are starting to realize they need high-quality web hosting. It seems more and more people are abandoning the oversold providers out there. All right. And contests.
I do like that jingle. Thanks to Steve Goodtime and Brant Matthews for that one. And we don’t have our contest set up yet. We’re looking to bring them back live at the beginning of June, and reason being we’ve taken a hiatus for multiple reasons. The reasons aren’t important, but just know that they are coming back, and we’re going to be giving away free licenses once again provided by the developers out there. Why was a message deleted by the Google Moderator team? What was in there with the Google Moderator team? What the hell?
Amber: That was a link to donation stuff, that’s all. The moderator team, they have like five moderating teams now.
John: I guess Google is moderating our website and moderating what we’re doing here. That was the link to donate on our show or to our website. It was, wasn’t it?
Amber: Yes, those were the links to donate to our website, and also to the artist’s website.
John: Well, that’s fuck. What the hell?
Amber: That is really weird.
John: Put them back up again. Well, they’ll delete them again, or they’re going to cancel us. Well, whatever, if they cancel us, this means we won’t be able to do live anymore. We’ll just do a pre-recorded show, or hopefully, Odyssey all have their streaming soon. All right. Well, so be it. Where was I before I noticed that — oh yeah, contest, the contests are coming back. All right. Closing out a couple of quick things before we go into the Q&A segment. Plugins I covered for this episode are Earthquake Monitor, which I rated with a five dragons, The Order Reports for WooCommerce, which I rated with four dragons, the Disable FLoC easily, which I rated with five dragons. That could be why maybe they’re pissed about all the getting the FLoC out of your stuff today.
Amber: Maybe. So I covered Search Only Posts, which I rated at three.
John: They deleted it again.
Amber: Yeah, they deleted. Yeah. NVV Login Control, which I rated at five, and Size Guarantee, which I rated at four dragons.
John: There’s no point in putting them back up there because they’ll keep deleting it.
Amber: Yeah, don’t even bother putting them up. We have the show notes. Everyone knows to go to the show notes.
John: Go to the show notes. All the links are in the show notes. I guess that’s what we have to tell them now. We can’t just put links to websites up there. Keep it up, how to piss off Google in one easy slice. All right.
Amber: Oh, they’re getting faster in deleting them.
John: They are. That was quick. Those were sniped really fast. Wow! That’s quick, man. All right. They’re sitting there and watching us. I wonder if they’re listening to. Now, we do have four listeners, and I can account for a couple, so maybe there’s someone sneaking in here.
Amber: Yeah, that’s how they deleted the Artist’s link. That sucks
John: Yeah. Remove moderator. Who the hell is the moderator?
Amber: Remove moderator?
John: Oh no, Never mind. I don’t — no, I have to figure that out later. All right. Let’s wander on and get into this since everything is all broken in sideways.
It’s question and answer time.
John: With Amber.
Amber: All right. So if you have any questions that you would like to ask, send them to me at amber@wppro.ca. I will get them into the segment; we will get you some answers. So, my first question for you is what is internal linking?
John: Internal linking. That is when you are linking to other posts within your website. You’re linking back and forth; you write up an article and say, oh, yeah, I wrote this article over here. This is a link to another post inside my website. It’s internal linking. And search engines tend to like internal linking. It helps build more links and verifications of your website within itself — authority on your website within itself.
Amber: Okay, my next question is where do you go for open free software? Actually, there’s like three questions and one here, so I’m just going to ask them all at once.
John: Okay.
Amber: Where do you go for open free software? Is there a specific site? How do you know if — what you are getting is not chock-full of viruses?
John: Okay. All right. Well, I guess I’ll answer to those two questions here in one. Open free software is available pretty much anywhere. You got to search the web for what you’re looking for, go to a site and pray that it doesn’t have viruses, or run it through a virus scanner. And once upon a time, it was quite safe to download that stuff. And for the most part, it’s still safe to download it, but a lot of free software now include not viruses so much as an Adware, or they install something onto your computer that acts kind of like a virus, or they install add-ons into your computer, which add-ons into your browser. So when you’re surfing the web, it slows it down and serves ads to you. All kinds of other crap goes into it. Getting the good free software now is kind of hard. One of the best places for good free software is GitHub — GitHub or Bitbucket, where developers put their stuff, other Open Source stuff publicly available at GitHub, and you can go download the software direct from GitHub. So there are lots of places to get it. Most of my stuff, I can’t even tell you where it comes from anymore. I don’t download as much free software, and when I do look for something, I sort of gauge how the website is doing, how many ads they’re throwing at me, and other things to determine how scammy they seem to be. And I don’t install much on my primary computer anymore. I have a secondary computer. I’ll install it on there and test it, and that secondary computer is basically a hole that I can toss things at and reformat it if something goes bad.
Amber: It’s your sandbox.
John: It’s the sandbox basically. And in your primary computer, you should never toss anything into that until you’ve tested it elsewhere to make sure it’s not going to impact your primary computer. Once upon a time, you could have done it, but not anymore.
Amber: Right, so test everything on the kid’s computer first?
John: Yeah, there you go. Test on the kid’s computer. That works really well. So yeah, and that’s basically — in an open free software, there’s still a lot of it. I still have a ton of it from the days of what used to be called Shareware. You download a program and just share it around, and adjust it for yourself, but I’ve still got a lot of Shareware programs that are still kicking around in some of my hard drives every once in a while — like, oh, what’s all this? I forgot all about that. So I’ve got a lot of stuff downloaded from the years. It’s too bad I couldn’t actually have been better at organizing it. All right. Well, read out your last question here, and then we will cut the show off and just carry it on the YouTubers.
Amber: All right, my last question is, how do you get your home-based server on two separate lines. So far as I know, you can only have one Internet in a house.
John: Okay, that one is a very good question, and I will answer that when we come back from this, and I’ll be back in a moment.
Reminders for the show: All the show notes can be found at wppluginsatoz.com, and while you’re there, subscribe to the newsletter for more useful information delivered directly to your inbox. WP Plugins A-Z is a show that offers honest and unbiased reviews of plugins created by developers because you support the show. Help keep the show honest and unbiased by going to wppluginsatoz.com/donate and set the donation level that fits your budget.
Help us make the show better for you by subscribing and reviewing the show at Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and in the iTunes Store. You can also leave us a review on our Facebook page using wppluginsatoz.com/facebook. You can also watch the show live on YouTube, check out the screencasts and training videos, and remember to subscribe and hit the bell to get notifications of all new videos. Follow the show on Twitter @wppluginsatoz.
John can be reached at his website, JohnOverall.com, or email him directly at john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us and have a great day.
Thanks for listening to the show. This show is copyright by JohnOverall.com. So until next time, have yourselves a good morning, good afternoon, or a good evening, wherever you happen to be out there on the globe today.